An Ontology for Conceptual Modelling of Urban Traffic Management System

The traffic management system is an essential urban management system that plays an important role in urban development and solving problems such as air pollution and citizens staying in traffic. The ever-increasing growth of cities and the increase in the use of private cars by citizens, and on the other hand, the lack of adequate development of the urban transportation space, highlight the importance of using an effective traffic management system. Considering the complexity of the traffic management systems in terms of the multiplicity of concepts and their specific meanings, it is necessary to provide a general and easy to understand conceptual model for urban planners to convey the required knowledge of these systems as well as to support them when making decisions about infrastructure development. Also, considering that there are different people and systems in a traffic management system, the interaction between them and the exchange of messages between them requires the same understanding of the concepts. A conceptual model is used as a dictionary for these purposes. The review of the related research shows that although some models have been presented for traffic systems, but each one has studied a specific aspect of the system and does not provide the necessary comprehensiveness. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to present an ontology including concepts in traffic management systems and the relationships between them to be used as a conceptual model. To create the ontology, first existing models are merged and aligned, and then new concepts are added to the model. Finally, highly specialized concepts have been removed from the model to maintain the model's comprehensiveness and generality. This model includes concepts related to people, objects, communication, services and infrastructure of traffic management systems. To represent the ontology, the class diagram of the UML language is used, which is a standard language for representing systems.